The Vegan Police Have Come for Ariana Grande
Just as the drama about her misspelled tattoo finally receded into the past, another deluge of drama has hit Ariana Grande, who’s now under attack from some of Twitter’s staunchest vegans. The days since the release of her Starbucks drink, the “Cloud Macchiato,” turn out to have been enough time for Grande’s fans and critics to study the fine print on the drink’s ingredient list, where many discovered, to their horror, that practicing vegans are ineligible to partake in Grande’s consumption of clouds, seeing as the “cloud powder” itself gets its fluffy texture from egg whites.
It gets worse: The caramel sauce topping also contains the triple threat of milk, heavy cream, and butter. And, as People points out, without either of those two add-ons, the drink is essentially the same as a regular ole macchiato—or a regular ole soy macchiato, if you take Grande’s hashtagged suggestion to “#trythesoyversion,” which misled many to believe that the drink could be made vegan, which they were under the impression Grande was herself.
It’s not just vegan Ari fans who are upset, but also noticeable number of Starbucks employees, many of whom have been sounding off on Twitter. “You literally cannot make it vegan, the key ingredient in cloud powder is egg whites to make it more like meringue,” one barista tweeted, expressing much more patience than the one who made the all-caps announcement, “IF I HAVE ONE MORE /VEGAN/ CUSTOMER COME TO STARBUCKS AND ASK FOR A CLOUD MACCHIATO MADE WITH SOY EXPECTING IT TO BE VEGAN IM GOING TO SCREAM.”
Overall, the replies are rather alarmingly testy, with some users having no shame in asking Grande fan accounts to “please delete” their tweets stating that some of the drinks don’t contain eggs or dairy. The account’s reply—a full-on script for Ari fans to read aloud to baristas, which admittedly makes no mention of the fact that the order is then for a regular macchiatos—has since led to accusations that those behind the account are “ENCOURAGING animal deaths!” One vegan even took the opportunity to share their opinion that Grande’s beloved pet pig appears to be underweight. (In her defense, Grande has repeatedly demonstrated that her love for her dogs, at the very least, knows no bounds; she even posed with one of them in one of the promotional photos for Starbucks.)
More to the point, though, is that it’s up for debate as to whether Grande, who regularly wears leather and fur, actually even is vegan these day. (Many of her fans have replied to critics stating that she bid farewell to veganism in 2017.) It was back in 2013, after all, that Grande excitedly announced her “first day as a 100% Vegan!!!!,” though she definitely stuck with it for at least a year; in 2014, she told the Mirror that juggling veganism and her Italian roots isn’t an issue for her, because she “was raised on meat and cheese, so I’ve had enough for anyone’s normal life span.”
At least Grande can take comfort in the fact that she isn’t the only celebrity who’s been singled out for vegan hypocrisy as of late. Despite recently offering fans willing to commit to veganism the opportunity to win a lifetime’s worth of tickets to their shows, Beyoncé and Jay-Z actually haven’t yet committed to full-time veganism themselves.
